Alas, LTE is like an Olympic runner just coming out of the bathroom with his pants still around his ankles. Yeah, he's super fast and can perform tremendously well, but he's in too damn big of a hurry and needs to take a moment to pull his pants up, clean himself up, and get it together.

Certainly not helping matters was Apple's declination to support 4G in the Apple 4S release because its/Jobs's dim view of the quality of LTE chipsets at that stage.

Thanks for reading the article Pablo and Marcia, You are both correct in that LTE is still in a rollout stage around the world, and certainly distributed enterprises should discuss current and planned coverage at each location with Mobile Network Operators. Operators are internally motivated to move to LTE due to its efficiencies in RF and network infrastructure and customers are motivated to use LTE due to lower latency and higher bandwidth. In my mind, this creates a perfect storm for operators to drive aggressive LTE rollout and use it as competitive differentiation.

Agreed, data connectivity is very important in today's business environment, another important consideration are the employees of the business that are at the last mile of the data.

Firstly, the importance of connectivity needs to be understood through-out the organization, and secondly, the retail manager of the location needs to prioritize tasks, for instance, at times when the primary line is down (the secondary line is still operational and the business remains functioning) -- efforts to restore the primary line should be prioritized by the branch.

Normally, at home when the primary DSL link goes down, individuals begin to use their mobile data through tethering, a business can also benefit from tethering -- creating a third layer of security, if they are flexible with connectivity. BYOD and BYOA have been in the enterprise since some time now, maybe, BYOC will become the same.

Great point, power is the backbone on which the infrastructure of networks are based, in this regard, it is nice to do business with data service providers that not only have backup units installed (battery bank), but have also embraced on-site renewable energy generation. In normal operations these towers can be net generators of energy and during extended periods of blackouts, caused by bad weather, they can be self-sustaining.

You stated ' For example, different wired connections at the last mile are still commonly run through the same conduit. When that's the case and an event physically damages the conduit, it typically takes out both connections, leaving the business with an unacceptable amount of downtime until repairs are made.'

This is very important concept and last mile , aggregation or even core of the networks might have shared infrastucture. Generally because the same transport equipment , same fiber conduit etc. If they share the infrastructure , we call this as fate sharing but commonly this concept is known as Shared Risk Link Group or SRLG.

In the core of the networks, if there are more than two paths, IP and MPLS traffic engineering is used to diverge the path to non shared risk link group paths.

3G, Satellite, 4G , LTE all can be used as backup and even as load balanced.

If latency is high over 3G, 4G link compare to link which is considered as primary, applications which require high bandwith ( such as FTP ) can be sent through 3G,4G and applications which require low latency, low packet loss ratio ( such as voice and video ) can be send through primary link ( Ideally MPLS, DWDM,Dark Fiber , SDH ).

What about the power considerations? Many times when there is a big weather event, for example, the failure is not necessarily in the communication line but in the disruption of power. I'm sure the towers have backup generators, but they only last so long.

If you are located in a large urban area chances are there is good LTE 4G conectivity. And LTE is, as pointed out in the article, a good backup option since is not sharing the same circuits as DSL, cable and Fiber.

But LTE is not everywhere. Many places in Europe are still rolling out the infrastructure, and 3G HSDPA is not reliable due to saturation.

When evaluating different options corporations need to check the possibilities in every location.